Soft shadow matte in alpha channel within light penumbra

[bob dobbs]

I'm trying to get a smooth falloff in my shadow pass, but between the light hotspot and penumbra is a hard cutoff. It might be that this is not the right way to go about it, but I haven't run into this issue before when setting up a shadow matte.
The issue happens with 3dsMax standard lights and VRay lights (disc, directional). I can get the results that I would expect with a Raw Shadow element.
Is this expected behavior?
3dsMax 2018 VRay 3.6.04

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

I can get the same matte shadow behavior in my quick test here and it doesn't look correct to me. Although It's possible to have a specific reason for ray tracing the matte shadows in that way, I prefer to log it as a bug in our system and to be considered by our developers. Will post here when I have any information to share.

[bob dobbs]

Awesome. Thank you for looking into this. I think we worked around the issue by using a Raw Lighting element, but it still didn't get the results we needed perfectly. I'd love to hear if there is a solution. Thanks again.